Originally Posted by JimmyPOP

I didn't say anything about selling CD's from a store for 6 dollars, I said distributors selling CD's to CD stores for 6 dollar and then RETAIL stores marking the prices up to 12 dollars. do you work for a distrubution company or a retail company the sells cd's?

I have access to what my store pays for each CD. I may work for a retail company but I can see how much we pay for each and every item we sell. Computers and CD's are just two of the many items we sell at a loss.

Originally Posted by solargrrl

Sure, except at least 2 of the "big box" stores have contractual agreements with their suppliers and distributors allowing them to almost sell those "loss leaders" on consignment. So if those records don't sell, the distributors never see their money, so who actually lost on that deal? That's why the shipped versus sold record count is getting even more of a spread.

Yeah, if we don't sell a title we ship it back to our distributor and we get credit for it. But still, we loose money on each CD we sell usually. The distributor will eventually sell it to someone tho.

For example lets say we order 100 of some new CD that is expected to sell a lot. After 2 weeks only 25 sell. Then we would send back probably 60 of them only leaving 15 on our shelves. We get credit back for those 60 but the 25 we sold and the 15 on the shelf still we loose money on. Where I work we own 100% of our inventory. We just have deals in place with our distributor for them to buy back. Or in some cases we will ship the CD's to locations that the title is actually selling.

Originally Posted by JimmyPOP

First let me clarify the last part first, I wasn't making those specific numbers the actual numbers that the wholesale price is, it seems like you missed the point, im saying that a lot of people don't know that the label isnt getting the "12.99" they see on the tag at a target or best buy. And most indie bands have starting sales at 9.99 so they def are buying the CD's for cheaper than that, I would guess 6-7 dollars.

and for the other points, true...selling a million is a big deal especially some random band, but I would assume that Virgin saw these guys thinking they could be the next fall out boy or something which would give them an expectation to sell at least 2 million for at least 2-3 CD's. And you need to realize that they wouldn't sell ANYTHING compared to what they did without promotion because in this day and age...whatevers on MTV sells and people forget about anything else. Yellowcard for example...Ocean Avenue sold around 3 mill, lights and sounds sold around 1 mill worldwide, and id be suprised if Paper walls will break 350k. They keep getting less and less promotion, and honestly Paper walls was SOO much better than Lights and Sounds. Also, RJA are no where near as good as Yellowcard. Without Promotion I would guess they wouldn't even break 40k in their first week.

And to the person who said Boys Like Girls is on the same track...I would disagree. Those labels took different tracks on promotion. Boys like girls debut was out for 7 months before it got play time on MTV...hell the first week I don't even think it charted on the billboard it sold like 2,000 cd's...but after a few magazine ads and internet front pages they started to rise in popularity and eventually the label was able to pay for them to record a video. Virgin on the other hand probably put a million dollars in marketing before the CD was even out...Id be pissed too if it took them a year and a half to go gold, id call it a commercial failure.

i love how you're the only one that understands this concept while
everyone else assumes that platinum equals success!
I remember in a Kayne interview, he said his album went 3x platinum and
his label didn't recoup the cost from marketing the album. So for all you suckers
that think platinum is success, go do some research and you'll find out that it is
nowhere near true.

Originally Posted by CarouselBoy

that still doesn't explain why they would drop them. With all the marketing they did for this album they wouldn't have to do as much to get reasonable results for the next one. A lot of people would already know who RJA was and they'd be looking out for the new one, even with normal advertising.

i'm sure capitol thought the same thing about yellowcard until lights and sounds didn't sell
nearly as well as ocean avenue.

http://www.virginrecords.com/home/artists.html#r

look at this... theyre still on virgin... so everyones getting worked up over nothing... well at least nothing that has been officially announced... and their myspace has said they were labelless for months

they were on a major label then they went unsigned for a while. and just a little while ago they were on an indie label, and now they're unsigned again.

i heard an interview with ronnie fairly recently and he was saying that there was a lot of stuff going on with the label (being sold or something) and they didn't know what was going to happen.


either way- the new cd is all demoed out so i'm sure they'll find something.

maybe it had nothing to do with their record sales??
face down in the dirt.

Originally Posted by TheGoodnightMoon

I think we all get the point by now that they went platinum...

oook that's nice. sorry i didn't read every single post in this thread.

Stay that way.